Startup Community Poznań

Meet one of our first mentors - Bartosz Jóźwiak, IT lawyer

Most founders treat legal as something to deal with later. Later is usually when it gets expensive. Bartosz is a legal counsel and co-founder of Kolegial, working with new-tech companies on IP, copyright, and unfair competition. He also helps foreign startups set up in Poland.

He's the mentor for the questions that quietly decide your fate. Who owns the code, how to split equity without a future fight, what your contracts actually say, how to protect the thing you're building before someone else copies it.

Not legal advice at a distance. Six sessions with someone who's guided real startups through exactly this.

Apply as a mentee: https://scpoznan.com/en/mentoring

Last week, we spent a full day together working on what’s next for Startup Community Poznań.

As the community grows, we want to keep creating new things that actually bring value to founders, startups and everyone around the ecosystem. So we took a day to step back, think, plan and turn ideas into action.

Meet one of our first mentors - Fryderyk (Frederick) Szydlowski, founder of Embargo 🏨

Fryderyk started out as a point guard for PBG Basket Poznań. Injuries ended the sports career, so he moved to London and built something else: Embargo, a loyalty platform for restaurants, cafés and bakeries that later raised millions in funding.

He knows the parts founders don't post about. Killing a first idea, starting over, selling to skeptical business owners, and building a brand from zero in a market that wasn't waiting for you.

If you're wrestling with go-to-market, positioning, or how to get your first hundred customers to care, he's the person you want across the table for six sessions.

Apply as a mentee: https://scpoznan.com/en/mentoring

Meetups are good for a lot of things. Networking, a fresh idea, a quick gut-check over coffee. But the real founder problems, the ones that keep you up at night, rarely get solved between a croissant and a refill.

So we built the next step 😏

At Startup Community Poznań our mission has always been simple: help Polish founders start faster, grow smarter, and scale braver. This is that mission with a longer time horizon.

We went to the founders who've already walked the path, the ones who've raised, hired, shipped, and survived the hard quarters, and asked them to give something back. Not a one-off talk. A real commitment: around 6 one-on-one sessions with a single founder across three months. Pro bono. No pitch, no catch.

On the other side are founders from our community who raised their hand because they want to make progress on a real problem, not collect tips. Idea stage, pre-MVP, first customers, scaling. Different challenges, same hunger.
The point is continuity. You see what changes between session one and session six. The feedback actually lands, because there's a next session to check it against.

The best ecosystems aren't built by the newest people or the most experienced ones. They're built when the two talk to each other, regularly, honestly, over time.

That's what we're starting this autumn.
Mentors and mentees, both apply here: https://scpoznan.com/en/mentoring

Poland's startup community is scattered. Warsaw does its thing, Kraków does its thing, Wrocław and the Tricity do their own thing. Great people who rarely sit at the same table.

Startup Community Summit exists to build that table. One day in Poznań where the whole community meets in one place, no matter which city you're coming from. 💪🏼

Poznań isn't an accident. We're building the largest startup community in the region here, and we know how to connect people so something actually comes out of it.

October 21, Concordia Design. See you there?
https://www.startupcommunitysummit.com

Who is Startup Community Summit for?

🚀 For founders building something real who need capital, people, or first customers.

💵 For investors who want curated dealflow instead of scrolling through hundreds of cold messages.

🗣️ For operators and community builders holding this ecosystem together: organizers, accelerator people, connectors.

If you recognize yourself in any of these, this is your place. If you're after free coffee and a selfie with the stage, there are better events.

350 seats. Applications open.
https://www.startupcommunitysummit.com

What an incredible evening at Startup Community Poznań! 🚀

More than 50 founders, entrepreneurs, and startup enthusiasts came together to discuss one of the most important startup challenges: turning an idea into paying customers. The Open Space Technology format created space for meaningful conversations, practical knowledge sharing, and discussions on topics that truly matter to early-stage founders. The energy in the room and the quality of the conversations were outstanding.

Join us for Startup Community Poznań: From Idea to Paying Customer, a hands-on session focused on one of the hardest parts of building a startup — getting those first real sales.

The session will be facilitated by Aleksandra Lemańska in the Open Space Technology (OST) format, designed for open discussion, experience sharing, and tackling real challenges founders face day to day.

It’s a chance to exchange ideas, connect with other founders, ask questions, and get practical inspiration from the local startup ecosystem.

📅 11 June, 17:30
📍 eNStudios, Głogowska 216, Poznań
🗣️ PL & EN
🎟️ Free entry, registration required
https://scpoznan.com/en/social-events/startup-community-pozna-49-from-idea-to-paying-customer-en--pl

SCP on tour continues 🚂 This time our team members Aleksandra Lemańska and Kacper Bartoszak went to Kraków for WordCamp Europe, keeping the momentum going across cities and communities.

What always stands out at WordCamp is how much of the internet still runs on WordPress. A huge percentage of websites worldwide are built on it, which makes the conversations here feel very grounded in reality, not theory. You can see how a massive open source ecosystem continues to evolve in real time.

What’s even more interesting is how the community is now adapting to AI. From plugin developers to content creators, there is a clear shift toward experimenting with AI tools, integrating them into workflows, and thinking about how AI changes publishing, SEO (btw Kacper ran a panel on the future of SEO), and site management. It’s not resistance, it’s active experimentation.

It feels like a continuation of the same open source mindset that made WordPress dominant in the first place. Now the question is how that same community will shape and integrate AI into the web layer that they already own in such a meaningful way.